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Capacity Building Teams

One of the most cost effective ways of building a nonprofit’s capacity is to recruit a capacity building team of five to ten volunteers, each of whom are willing to donate 8 hours per month to help your nonprofit build a needed capacity. Anyone that has affiliated themselves with your nonprofit (employees, Board members, volunteers, sponsors, etc.) might be willing to help your nonprofit in this way. Click here to read our letters on “Committees that Work” and “Building a Committee Infrastructure.”

There is a fairly wide variety of ways in which nonprofits go about building capacity. Click here to look at a slide presentation (in “PDF format”) on a variety of capacity building strategies that teams can choose from. You might also want to read our letter on “Developing Goals and Strategies” (Click here).

If you are working with one of our coaches, and ask them to facilitate your capacity building team’s process, they are likely to follow the process described in the next page, help the team define its goals and strategies as illustrated on the succeeding page, and follow the facilitation principles as outlined on the page after that.

If you are planning to apply for a coach, and want your coach to facilitate a capacity building team effort, please mention that as one of your expectations on your application. Click here to apply for a no-cost Executive Coach.

Team Coaching Process

A Team Coach’s role is to lead a nonprofit capacity building committee through a process of developing and implementing capacity building goals and strategies that enables the nonprofit to fulfill more of its mission. The coaching process consists of the following steps:

1. Work with your primary client contact to build a capacity building committee of people, each of whom has agreed to invest 8 hours/month for at least one year, and has committed to follow the process that their Team Coach will lead them through.
   
   
2. Work with the committee of 5-10 people to review their nonprofit’s mission and vision, and then agree on a challenging (50% chance of success) capacity building goal, with annual milestones for the next three years. Capacity building goals typically define how much of an increase in a needed service the committee believes it can deliver, given the number of people on the committee and each person’s willingness to invest 8 hours/month to build their nonprofit’s capacity.
   
   
3. Help the committee identify the resource acquisition strategies that are sufficient to enable the nonprofit to meet their first annual service delivery milestone goal. Each strategy should have a measure of how much of that resource is needed quarterly in order for the committee to achieve its goal for the year. In order for a strategy to be viable, a committee member must agree to be held accountable for acquiring that resource. That person can then recruit others to help them implement their strategy.
   
   
4. The Team Coach then writes a strategy statement (click here for an illustrative example) that includes the key elements of step 2 and 3. The key elements are the annual capacity building goals for delivering services, the strategic measures of how much of what resources are needed by when to meet the year’s goal, and who has agreed to be accountable for acquiring each resource. As soon as the group agrees on a key element, make a note, and move on the next element. After the meeting, write up the strategy statement in your own words, and E-mail it to all the members prior to the next meeting. Focus any follow-up discussion on agreeing on goals, measures and roles, and not on word-smithing. The group should be able to agree on all the key elements of a strategy statement by the second or third session.
   
   
5. Once the roles, goals and strategic measures are agreed to, ask each committee member for an Action Plan of how they plan to invest their 6 hours of effort, prior to the next monthly meeting, to implement the resource acquisition strategies. Agree on who will take notes and publish these individual commitments, and who will collect the monthly data on the status of the overall goal and each strategic measure.
   
   
6. At subsequent monthly meetings, ask for the reports on the status of the goal and strategic measures. Then ask each committee member to report on the results of their six hours of effort. Each report should be treated as a success, or as a valuable learning experience as to what does not seem to work for the program or an individual team member. Then repeat step 5. If, after several months, a strategy is not getting implemented, or is not producing the desired result, it may be appropriate to abandon it, and think of alternate strategies that might work. At each year-end, the team might want to review and adjust all the strategies to capitalize on all of the team’s learnings thus far.
   
   

Illustrative Team Strategy

ABC’s mission: To provide those services that are needed for everyone in our
community to live in conditions conducive to them being responsible and involved members of our community.

ABC’s vision: Everyone in our community is living in safe, healthy and supportive
conditions.

ABC’s Capacity Building Goal: The number of services we deliver doubles in three
years, from 625 in 2Q04 to 780 in 2Q05, 980 in 2Q06 and 1250 2Q07.

 

Strategies that are sufficient for us to achieve our first year goal:

Sam: Develop an outreach program to increase participation in our programs
Measure: The number of prospects reached increases 10% per quarter

Louise: Be able to offer our clients a more complete menu of services by getting other       
non-profits to offer their services to our clients at our facility.
Measure: One new service provider agrees to serve our clients each quarter

Jill: Diversify our funding stream by developing new grantors, major individual and
business donors, fund raising events and campaigns, and fees for service.
Measure: Each quarter, add at least one new funding source that represent at least 5% of our budget.

Alice: Get interns and professional practices to donate their services to give us more
capacity to serve our client’s needs for case management, counseling, health and medical services.
Measure: Add the equivalent of 0.25 professional people per quarter.

Juan: Initiate a public relations program that results in more civic and government
organizations supporting our programs.
Measure: Each quarter, one more organization agrees to sponsor our programs

Sharon: Convince local day care centers to accept a few of our clients’ children at no
charge, to give their parents the opportunity to search for employment.
Measure: Our day care capacity increases by one child each quarter

Helen: Attract volunteers that are willing and able to supervise a new after school
activity, or are able to help children with their homework, or are willing to take them on a variety of field trips.
Measure: At least 3 new volunteers are involved in these programs each quarter

Team Coaching Principles

Capacity building is about getting a nonprofit to reach out to the community, to enroll volunteers to serve on Boards or committees, to deliver services to clients, or do some of the administrative work of the nonprofit.

1. Reaching out to the community to build capacity requires a sustained effort. As a practical minimum for making a meaningful impact, we ask nonprofits to commit at least 40 hours/month of effort, for at least a year, to the program. That minimum is typically met by getting five people to each commit 8 hours a month to the program. Most Board members, volunteers and staff members are willing to invest two hours a week to help build the capacity of a nonprofit that they believe in. The upper limit is 10 team members, because it is so difficult to lead a team if it is larger than 10 people.
   
   
2. The coach’s role is to lead a nonprofit capacity building team though a process of getting the team to agree on their capacity building goals, the role that each individual will play in acquiring how much of what kind of resources the nonprofit needs to meet its goal, what each member plans to do in the coming month to fulfill their effort commitment to their role, and to report on what each team member accomplished or learned from their monthly Action Plan (prior to proposing their Action Plan for the next month).
   
   
3. A coach is trying to institutionalize a team culture of staying focused on achieving measurable team and individual goals, and continually learning how to be even more successful by sharing monthly action plans and consequences. It takes 1-3 years to institutionalize this process and culture in a team. But once it is achieved, it tends to be self-sustaining.
   
   
4. Strategy is about making choices of who must do how much of what by when. If a capacity    building goal or a resource acquisition strategy consists of nothing but words, it is a statement of values that may make people feel good, but does not typically energize anyone to do anything. In order to energize the team to do something, the capacity building goal must state how much of a needed service the team will enable their nonprofit to deliver by the end of year 1, 2 and 3. The team members then need to decide who will be responsible for acquiring what amount of each resource each quarter (strategies) that the team needs in order to meet its service delivery goal for the year. The coach’s role is to get team members to focus on making these choices in the first or second session.
   
   
5. A non-profit’s capacity building team should use their own judgment to select capacity building goals, and their strategies for achieving them, that feels right for them and their organization. If the goals and strategies do not reflect the interests of the team, they may not implement the strategies (A coach should resist the temptation to suggest strategies and tactics to the team). When team members implement their ideas, they will have the learning experiences they need to become even better planners in the future. This is the self-sufficient team learning and accomplishment culture that a coach should be trying to create. The coach should focus on the process and let team members select the content.
   
   
6. The coach and the team should put its priority on building organizational momentum to actually implement capacity building strategies, in order to quickly get some results and learning, rather than debating which strategies or actions are ideal. If some parts of the plan fall short of expectations, additional strategies and actions can always be added later (e.g. operational learning and adjusting on the fly, verses putting everything on hold until a study and/or debate of all the options and their risks can be completed, destroying the team’s momentum).
   
   
7. The committee should trust that the monthly actions that each team member proposes to take to fulfill their strategic role are the actions that the committee should endorse as being part of the team’s monthly Action Plan, rather than ideas that someone else has proposed that a team member do. A team member is more likely to implement and make their own ideas work, than someone else’s idea that was assigned to them. If their Action Plan for the month does not work very well, they will find a way to come up with a better Action Plan the next month. Team members need to trust one another and the process of learning how to develop an even better Action Plan each month.
   
   
8. It is not uncommon for nonprofits to spend a lot of time in meetings sharing information and ideas, discussing issues and options, etc.. These diversions can be a satisfying way for committee members to build relationships and avoid the stress of trying to agree on a capacity building goal for the team, defining strategies of who will responsible for delivering what amount of what resource each quarter, committing to individual monthly Action plans to implement those strategies, and reporting what was actually accomplished or learned prior to developing the next months action plan. If a coach does not act to limit the time spent on conversational diversions, they can seriously retard the team’s rate of progress, resulting in a possible loss of interest in the team, its coach and the capacity building program.